If you asked me what I like about Steam, I’d say the choice of games on offer and the large discounts that appear regularly. Without those discounts I’d overlook a number of games purely because I just don’t have time to buy and play them all when they first get released. Paying full price for a game that’s several months or years old would also stop a lot of gamers investing, myself included.

David DeMartini, head of EA’s rival digital games service Origin, has this week stated Origin will never go down the same route as Steam. Talking about what he classes as “going-out-of-business sales,” he believes the 75% or higher discounts are not the right approach to selling digital games.

I’m sure many gamers would disagree with him, but DeMartini is adamant that such sales don’t help anyone. They cheapen the IP and do a disservice to the developers who worked on them. He says Origin is “not trying to be Target” where the idea is to shift units. Apparently EA’s aim is to always offer “a fair price point” on Origin with an occasional (small) discount.

DeMartini says Origin has an alternative way of dealing with older games you’d expect to carry a lower price, but refused to go into detail. What is clear though, is you’ll never see a game offered for just a handful of dollars on Origin, and you won’t see lots of games packaged together for a significantly lower price.

That could negatively impact Origin in terms of its popularity, but then EA may choose to bypass that issue as it has been doing by making an Origin account mandatory for certain games. It won’t get them many future sales if game prices are kept artificially high, but it will ensure a growing user base purely out of necessity.